Aahana Swrup
Directed by Claire Scanlon, ‘The Love Hypothesis’ charts the story of a romance that starts off as a counterfeit. The romantic comedy movie revolves around Olive Smith, a doctoral student at Stanford University, and Dr. Adam Carlsen, an intimidating young biology professor. The student unwillingly realizes that she’s standing in the way of her best friend’s happily ever after. As a result, she concludes that the only way to solve the problem is by pretending to be in a relationship herself so that her friend, Anh, can focus on her own love life.
Meanwhile, Adam has a pressing need to prove he has roots in the city if he wants to get his academic grant renewed with the university. Consequently, the two realize that a month-long plot of fake dating can be the solution to both their problems. Nonetheless, in matters of the heart, things rarely go as expected. The film offers an authentic and relatable story about love, friendship, and the world of STEM. Interestingly enough, the tale sports a unique origin story.
The Love Hypothesis Adapts a Book That Started Out as Star Wars Fanfiction
Instead of a true story basis, ‘The Love Hypothesis’ possesses intriguing literary roots. With Sarah Rothschild as the screenwriter, the film remains a faithful adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s eponymous 2021 novel. The book itself is a work of fiction that found its earliest start on Archive of Our Own, a site that archives fanworks. Before the release of her debut novel, Hazelwood wrote and published fan fiction for franchises such as ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars.’ When the author started considering the idea of creating her original work, she received a fateful message from a literary agent, with whom she would end up working. The agent had started reading some of her fan fiction on the website and encouraged her to pursue her idea of rewriting her fanworks as original stories.
As a result, Hazelwood chose her 2018 fan fiction titled ‘Head Over Feet’ as the story with the most potential to be reworked without its existing fandom-related context. The work was a story about Rey and Kylo Ren from the ‘Star Wars’ sequel trilogy. Once the author had made her choice and signed with the same literary agent, the story was extensively revised and modified with the help of an editor. Thus, the characters of Olive Smith and Adam Carlsen were born. Even though the story shed its fan fiction identity once it became ‘The Love Hypothesis,’ evidence of the story’s connection to the ‘Star Wars’ universe remained.
Fans of the franchise can likely relate characters, including the main pairing and the supporting cast around it, to their ‘Star Wars’ counterparts. In fact, the leading man, Adam Carlsen, seems to be named after Adam Driver, the actor who portrays the role of Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, in the ‘Star Wars’ sequel trilogy. This decision against shying away from the project’s past as a fanwork was one supported by both Hazelwood and her literary publishers. Notably, the book features a fan art of Rey and Kylo Ren, also known as their ship name Reylo, on its official cover. Years later, when adapting ‘The Love Hypothesis’ for the screen, director Claire Scanlon was initially oblivious to the story’s fandom-related past. Still, she wanted to ensure the translation of Olive and Adam’s story from the book to the screen remained authentic and accurate.
The STEM Backdrop in The Love Hypothesis Finds Authentic Roots in Reality
One of the defining aspects of ‘The Love Hypothesis’ stems from its setting in the STEM world of Stanford University. In the story, Olive is a doctoral student who is researching methods of detection for pancreatic cancer. On the other hand, Adam is a biology professor whose work involves circulating tumor cells. Naturally, the academic world of scientific academia becomes a primary part of the story, even beyond the background it provides. This aspect of the story is closely tied to the book’s author, Ali Hazelwood, who pursued a Ph.D. in neuroscience and served as a professor until 2022. In a conversation with Collider, the author spoke about her experience and its influence on her work.
Hazelwood shared, “I’d been wanting to write fanfiction set in academia just because it’s really… I’m a professor right now, but I feel like my entire adult life has been spent in academia. I feel like I would struggle to write any other setting, in a weird way. So it was just the more natural setting for a story.” Over the years, the author has published more of her works, bringing a refreshing take on stories about women in STEM. This focus on the fusion of romantic stories set in scientific academic worlds is a central theme that Claire Scanlon’s directorial film retains. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, the director spoke about the same.
Scanlon said, “We really wanted to honor that these women (Olive and Anh) deserve to be there. They work their asses off, and it’s not easy. It’s not just because they got there; that’s not the hard part. Staying there is the hard part. No life outside of your research and your studies, and why it’s worth it, and that these women in science belong there. Like for me, what drew me especially to the project was the female friendships and the support.”
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